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By Brady DennisThe Washington Post • Friday November 29, 2013 6:54 AM

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have created a digital database of
infectious-disease cases dating back 125 years, a treasure-trove of information that could help
scientists and public-health officials better understand how to fight the spread of deadly
afflictions.

The searchable database, outlined yesterday in the
New England Journal of Medicine, was funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

To construct it, researchers compiled weekly disease-surveillance reports published between 1888
and 2013 — about 6,500 tables in all — as well as data from agencies such as the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. The database tracks when and where people got sick, as well as how
many died from their illnesses.

What emerges is a detailed picture of how 56 infectious diseases have affected the American
landscape since the late 19th century — and what interventions have proved most effective in
stopping them.

By comparing reported outbreaks of polio, smallpox and other diseases with the dates when
vaccines for each came into use, researchers were able to document the lifesaving role those drugs
played.

“We saw these very abrupt declines of incidence rates across the country,” said lead author
Willem van Panhuis, assistant professor of epidemiology at the university’s Graduate School of
Public Health, known as Pitt Public Health. Ultimately, he and his co-authors estimated that the
introduction of vaccines had helped prevent 100 million cases of serious childhood diseases, a
figure they said is worth remembering during a time when critics have raised questions about the
necessity of vaccines.

“We really hope this will ignite debate about the use of vaccinations, and that it will provide
a new piece of evidence,” van Panhuis said. “We hope this will give this whole discussion a new
dimension.”

The creators of the new database also said they hope its utility lies not only in looking back
at the history of infectious diseases, but also in using the information to deal more effectively
with future outbreaks.

“As Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, ‘We live forward but understand backward,’ ” said
Donald Burke, dean of Pitt Public Health and a senior author of the project.

He said the database contains insights about the spread of diseases not always readily available
in the past, such as where they occurred and among what demographics, as well as the weather and
climate at the time. Those details could help epidemiologists more accurately predict and respond
to looming outbreaks.

“These are complicated problems,” Burke said. “We need to ground-truth all of our models. … We
need that historical basis.”

Organizers of the effort dubbed it Project Tycho, after 16th-century Danish nobleman Tycho
Brahe, whose astronomical observations laid the groundwork for Johannes Kepler to derive the laws
of planetary motion. Likewise, Burke said he hopes that the existence of the digitized infectious
disease records will spur a wave of lifesaving research and that other researchers find uses for
the database that its creators never even imagined. “The excitement is that this is going to be a
rich data source for discovering patterns in epidemiology,” he said.

Steven Buchsbaum, who leads the discovery and translational sciences team at the Gates
Foundation, said he expects the creation of the disease database to prompt other efforts like
it.

“We anticipate this will not only prove to be an invaluable tool permitting researchers around
the globe to develop, test and validate epidemiological models,” Buchsbaum said in a statement, “
but also has the potential to serve as a model for how other organizations could make similar sets
of critical public health data more broadly, publicly available.”

On the most granular level, Burke said, the database also provides data not merely for experts
and academics, but also for average people interested in discovering how epidemics have affected
their own part of the world over the past century.

“It’s not abstract,” he said of the information in the database. “It brings epidemiology to a
hometown level.”

Pitt’s disease database is available at
www.tycho.pitt.edu. Officials said it also will be
available soon at
HealthData.gov, a site managed by the federal Department of
Health and Human Services.